Boy, were we wrong here at Humane Tech Community saying all these bad things about FAANG. Talking that talk, and trying to have people walking the walk to turn away from these benevolent Big Tech companies.

After all, everyone and the cat are using their great products and services, right? So what can be wrong with them. Thanks to Aral Balkan - former activist for a better and more open and free, ethical internet - I came to see the error of my ways, and Tweeted and Tooted my mistake to the world. Do you also come around?

It’s always difficult admitting you’re wrong. But sometimes, it’s exactly what you have to do in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. So, today, I admit that I was wrong about Google, Facebook, and surveillance capitalism in general...

Think we can close this forum, and the Center for Humane Technology. There is no longer a need. We have reached our goals. Thank you all for your great participation over the last year. Let’s just enjoy the fruits of Big Tech now

It is getting harder and harder. Yet Firefox is still way, way better than Chrome. If you want to go completely tracker-free you should venture further in the FLOSS (Free, libre open-source software) world, and in general also have more technical knowledge. There are forks of both FF and Chrome that further improve security and/or privacy.

Anyway we show our preferences by our use. If many more people opted for Firefox then that is making a statement. There was a recent discussion about why Mozilla gets money from Google. Reason: Developing a browser rendering engine is immensely expensive. Making donations to companies on the right (or better) track would help, of course.

I consider FF tremendously important for the web, especially now that Microsoft has dropped their own rendering engine and opted for Chromium.

I’ve been using Brave and I love it. Built-in ad and tracker blocking, DuckDuckGo as default search engine and a promising experiment in developing an alternative business model with publishers paid in tokens. Built on Chromium but faster and better than Chrome: https://brave.com/